Waiting…

• The problem of reflexive definition• “WE” and “THEY”• Black needs white, day needs night, inside needs

outside• But in the case of an Empire; it can not rest.• It cannot look upon the other and be satisfied with a

differential reflection, because by its definition empire must expand, either by transforming the other, making it over in its own image, or by destroying the other, wiping it from the face of the earth.

• The empire seeks to eliminate the very "otherness" upon which its own existence depends. The "other" must become the "enemy."

• Bodies: • In Coetzee's novel, bodies are tortured,

broken, and made to endure. They may be blank spaces waiting to be inscribed with meaning, or surfaces that conceal, without apparent aperture—but which may be beaten or caressed, cut into, entered, and probed in search of some elusive truth.

• Borders:• Borders are defended and attacked,

questioned and crossed, made to stand for what is within and what is without. Borders are the great demarcation of a fatal dichotomy that has guided all of human history: the differentiation of US and THEM.

• Bodies and Borders imply limitation, division, and separation.

• The nameless narrator governs the nameless Empire. No recognizable sense is given.

• He has never visited the barbarian world, and can imagine its topography only through maps that he says are "patched … together from travellers' accounts over a period of ten or twenty years". He understands its people only by observing what he calls "the destitute tribes people with tiny flocks of their own along the river" (4), and the fisher-people who live closest to the settlement.

• He has not visited the Capital since he was young.• His knowledge about Imperial Capital and

Barbarians is limited.• Though on the margins, the magistrate led a

comfortable life for many years.• His easiness is born of carefully cultivated

ignorance.• “I have not asked for more than a quiet life in

quiet times“.• The Magistrate as a creature of an imperial Past.

• “I tell him some of the places I look back on with nostalgia: the pavilion gardens where musicians perform for the strolling crowds and one's feet rustle through fallen autumn chestnut leaves; a bridge I remember from which one sees the reflection of the moon on the water that ripples around the pediments in the shape of a flower of paradise (49–50).”

• Colonel Joll tortures the old man the young boy. The Magistrate is unable or unwilling to to hear the screams coming from the granary hut.

• “If I had only handed over these two absurd prisoners to the Colonel … If I had only gone on a hunting trip for a few days…with no question about what the word investigations meant, what lay beneath it like a banshee beneath a stone—if I had done the wise thing, then perhaps I might now be able to return to my hunting and hawking and placid...

• concupiscence…But alas, I did not ride away: for a while I stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.” (9)

• Ignorance of the Magistrate: “I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end (21).”

• The puncture marks on the boy's stomach and legs, the caterpillar-ish scar near the Barbarian girl's eye- Reflect the kind of "investigations" that Colonel Joll conducts.

• What of Joll's methods?• When tending to the young boy, he thinks, "It has

not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive“.

• From the Barbarian Girl's perspective, he thinks, "The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, is negligible“.

• Joll wants the supposed "truth" about Barbarian war plans against the empire, while the magistrate wants the "truth" about what Joll has done to the Barbarian Girl and her father, and by extension, what the Empire has done to "the other".

• Joll uses instruments of pain on the body, cutting into it, probing it to get the truth out of his victims.

• The Magistrate moves his hands over the Barbarian Girl's body, asking her questions, also seeking truth. "It is growing more and more clear to me," he admits, "that until the marks on this girl's body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her" (31).

• The barbarian girl is voiceless and what has happened to her remains a secret to the Magistrate.

• She is the figure of the voiceless or unspeaking "other.“

• Crimes against humanity

• In the novel Foe the character of Friday.• "linkage of language and power, the idea that

those without voices cease to signify, figuratively and literally“

• "In the makeshift language we share there are no nuances“.

• She may be able to tell him what happened, but that telling will not necessarily give him the kind of knowledge he seeks.

• Comparison between Friday (Robinson Crusoe), Friday (Foe) and the barbarian girl

• The Magistrate and Joll seek to make the other speak against her will, against her ability.

• Possessiveness of Joll and the narrator• Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish

that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we may learn to respect them. We think of the country here as ours, part of our Empire—our outpost, our settlement, our market centre.

• But these people, these barbarians don't think of it like that at all….they still think of us as visitors, transients….That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us.”

• The barbarians are variously described as both desert nomads and settled farmers, as both herdsmen and fisher people. They live near the imperial settlement, and they live far out in the unmapped lands beyond.

• They speak languages that are known, and languages that are unknown. They are peaceful and warlike, pitiable and fearsome. Who are they? What are they?

• The simple answer: THEY are whatever is not US.• “Barbarians" don't exist as the empire conceives

of them. Instead, the lesson of "otherness" can be learned only at the hands of empire and within its borders, where the conception of the "other" takes place.

• What is the "other"? The other is ENEMY• As D. Hall (2001) puts it, "an analysis of race,

ethnicity, and/or post-coloniality begins with the recognition that the social meanings ascribed to categories of race and ethnicity have led to profound injustices" (p. 267).